Liquidity Provision,Bank Capital,and the Macroeconomy

New bank equity must come from somewhere. In general equilibrium, raising bank capital requirements means either that banks produce less short‐term debt (as debt holders must become shareholders), or short‐term debt is not reduced and the banking system acquires nonbank equity (as the shareholders in nonbanks become shareholders in banks). The welfare effects involve a trade‐off because bank debt is special as it is used for transactions purposes, but more bank capital can reduce the chance of bank failure (producing welfare losses).     

Liquidity Coinsurance and Bank Capital

Banks can deal with their liquidity risk by holding liquid assets (self‐insurance), by participating in interbank markets (coinsurance), or by using flexible financing instruments, such as bank capital (risk sharing). We use a simple model to show that undiversifiable liquidity risk, that is, the liquidity risk that banks are unable to coinsure on interbank markets, represents an important risk factor affecting their capital structures. Banks facing higher undiversifiable liquidity risk hold more capital. We posit that, empirically, banks that are more exposed to undiversifiable liquidity risk are less active on interbank markets. Therefore, we test for the existence of a negative relationship between bank capital and interbank market activity and find support in a large sample of U.S. commercial banks.     

The Dependency of the Banks' Assets and Liabilities: Evidence from Germany

Two decades of developments in risk‐transfer instruments may have fundamentally changed the extent to which banks practice on‐balance sheet term and liquidity transformation. These changes should be deliberated in on‐balance sheet asset‐liability dependencies. By using correlation analyses, we investigate asset‐liability dependency for all three sectors of German universal banks from 1994 to 2007 and find that it declined over our sample period. We also investigate whether asset‐liability dependency varies systematically with a bank's affinity for using risk‐transfer instruments, regulatory capital, and profitability and document several differences between the three sectors of German universal banks.     

Bank Lending Standards and Access to Lines of Credit

This paper examines how changes in bank lending standards are related to the availability of bank lines of credit for private and comparable public firms. Overall, we find that access to lines of credit is more contingent on bank lending standards for private than for public firms. The impact of bank lending standards is however asymmetric: while private firms are less likely than public firms to gain access to new lines when credit market conditions are tight, we find no difference between public and private firms in terms of their use or retention of pre‐existing lines. We also find that private firms without lines of credit use more trade credit when bank lending standards are tight, which is suggestive of a supply effect. Overall, the evidence suggests that “credit crunches” are likely to have a disproportionate impact on private firms. However, pre‐existing banking relationships appear to mitigate the impact of these contractions on private firms.     

Liquidity Risk,Bank Networks,and the Value of Joining the Federal Reserve System

Reducing systemic liquidity risk related to seasonal loan demand was one reason for founding the Federal Reserve System. Nevertheless, less than 8% of state‐chartered banks joined the Fed in its first decade. Banks facing high liquidity risk from seasonal loan demand were more likely to join the Fed in its first decade. We also find evidence consistent with the notion that banks could obtain some indirect access to the discount window through interbank transfers. Some banks apparently joined the Fed to pass through discount window liquidity to other banks via the interbank network.  Joining the Fed increased member banks’ lending.     

Market Liquidity and Ambiguity: The Certification Role of Corporate Governance

We investigate how firm‐specific certification practices through corporate governance can reduce perceived ambiguity and thus enhance liquidity of a firm in the stock market. We show that better corporate governance helps reduce ambiguity. In addition, a reduction in ambiguity is significantly related to higher liquidity of firms. Our results are robust to alternative model specifications and measures of ambiguity, and remain statistically significant after controlling for other known determinants of ambiguity and liquidity. Our results shed light on how ambiguity can be moderated through firm‐level certification practices and on the channel through which a moderation of ambiguity affects shareholder wealth.     

Sovereign Credit Risk,Banks' Government Support,and Bank Stock Returns around the World

We explore the joint effect of expected government support to banks and changes in sovereign credit ratings on bank stock returns using data for banks in 37 countries between 1995 and 2011. We find that sovereign credit rating downgrades have a large negative effect on bank stock returns for those banks that are expected to receive stronger support from their governments. This result is stronger for banks in advanced economies where governments are better positioned to provide that support. Our results suggest that stock market investors perceive sovereigns and domestic banks as markedly interconnected, partly through government guarantees.     

The Co‐movement of Credit Default Swap,Bond and Stock Markets: an Empirical Analysis

We analyse the relationship between credit default swap (CDS), bond and stock markets during 2000–2002. Focusing on the intertemporal co‐movement, we examine monthly, weekly and daily lead‐lag relationships in a vector autoregressive model and the adjustment between markets caused by cointegration. First, we find that stock returns lead CDS and bond spread changes. Second, CDS spread changes Granger cause bond spread changes for a higher number of firms than vice versa. Third, the CDS market is more sensitive to the stock market than the bond market and the strength of the co‐movement increases the lower the credit quality and the larger the bond issues. Finally, the CDS market contributes more to price discovery than the bond market and this effect is stronger for US than for European firms.     

Liquidity risk and maturity management over the credit cycle

We show that firm demand-side factors are strong drivers of procyclical refinancing behavior over the credit cycle using novel data from the Shared National Credit program. Firms are more likely to refinance early when credit conditions are good to keep the effective maturity of their loans long and hedge against having to refinance in tight credit conditions. High credit quality firms are better able to hedge, making their refinancing propensity more sensitive to credit cycles than less creditworthy firms. There is a strong relationship between refinancing a loan, and subsequent growth in capital expenditure, especially when a loan is refinanced early.     

Rollover Risk,Liquidity and Macroprudential Regulation

I study rollover risk in wholesale funding markets when intermediaries hold liquidity ex ante and fire sales may occur ex post. Multiple equilibria exist in a global rollover game: intermediate liquidity holdings support equilibria with both positive and zero expected liquidation. A simple uniqueness refinement pins down the private liquidity choice, which balances the forgone expected return on investment with reduced fragility and costly liquidation. Due to fire sales, liquidity holdings are strategic substitutes. Intermediaries free ride on the holdings of other intermediaries, causing excessive liquidation. To internalize the systemic nature of liquidity, a macroprudential authority imposes liquidity buffers.     

Preferential Regulatory Treatment and Banks' Demand for Government Bonds

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the impact of preferential regulatory treatment on banks' demand for government bonds. Using unique transaction‐level data, our analysis suggests that preferential treatment in microprudential liquidity and capital regulation significantly increases banks' demand for government bonds. Liquidity and capital regulation also seem to incentivize banks to substitute other bonds with government bonds. We also find evidence that this “regulatory effect” leads banks to reduce lending to the real economy.     

融资流动性对商业银行资产配置行为的动态影响

使用14家上市银行2007~2013年季度数据建立面板向量自回归(PVAR)模型,运用脉冲响应函数分析融资流动性对银行资产配置行为的动态影响。研究结果表明：存款成本和银行间融资成本的上升,会激励银行增加风险资产,减少流动性储备,不利于银行防范结构性流动性风险;存款流失会削弱银行贷款扩张的动力,提升流动性偏好;同业融资依赖性的上升短期内可以改善银行资产的流动性,长期则会加大资金借短贷长的问题,为流动性危机埋下隐患。     

Jointly Optimal Regulation of Bank Capital and Liquidity

In an economy with financial frictions, banks endogenously choose excessive leverage and maturity mismatch in equilibrium, as they fail to internalize the risk of socially wasteful fire sales. Macroprudential regulators can achieve efficiency with simple linear constraints, which require less information than Pigouvian taxes. The liquidity coverage and net stable funding ratios of Basel III can implement efficiency. Additional microprudential regulation of leverage is required when bank failures are socially costly. Micro‐ and macroprudential rules are imperfect substitutes. Optimally, macroprudential policy reacts to systematic risk and credit conditions over the cycle, while microprudential policy reacts to systematic and idiosyncratic risk.     

Extending the Basel II approach to estimate capital requirements for equity investments

Under the Basel II banking regulatory capital regime the capital requirements for credit exposures are calculated using the Asymptotic Single Risk Factor (ASRF) approach. The capital requirement is taken to be the contribution of an exposure to the unexpected loss on the bank’s diversified portfolio. Here we extend this approach to calculate capital requirements for equity investments. We show that in the case when asset values have a normal distribution an analytical formula for the unexpected loss contribution may be developed. We show that the capital requirements for equity investments are quite different to those of credit exposures, since equity investments can suffer substantial loss of value even when the underlying company has not defaulted.     

Changing the Size of a Futures Contract: Liquidity and Microstructure Effects

We analyze the relation between contract size and liquidity using data from the respecification of Sydney Future Exchange's (SFE) Share Price Index (SPI) and 90-day Bank Accepted Bill (BAB) futures contracts. Respecification of SPI and BAB contracts presents a unique opportunity to investigate the effects of a change in futures contract size. SFE decreased the size of SPI futures by a factor of four while increasing its minimum tick. The BAB contract was doubled in size with the minimum tick size left unchanged. We find, after controlling for market factors, that the respecification of the SPI futures resulted in higher trading volume, while that of BAB futures decreased trading volume. The results regarding spreads are ambiguous. Based on two cases investigated, we conclude that decreasing the futures contract size was effective in terms of enhancing liquidity while increasing the size resulted in a reduction in liquidity.     

Liquidity Risk of Private Assets: Evidence from Real Estate Markets

Investment in thinly traded private assets involves liquidity risk. Existing literature provides limited guidance as it mainly focuses on publicly traded security assets such as stocks and bonds. This paper develops an analytical tool for quantifying liquidity risk of private assets. Using commercial real estate as a model asset and under reasonable assumptions, we find that the magnitude of liquidity risk is too large to be ignored, especially in down markets when liquidity risk is a great concern.     

Foreign bank entry and firms’ access to bank credit: Evidence from China

This paper studies the impact of foreign bank entry on domestic firms’ access to bank credit using a within-country staggered geographic variation in the policy of foreign bank lending in China. The paper finds that after foreign bank entry profitable firms use more long-term bank loans; whereas firms with higher value of potential collateral do not. It also finds that non-state-owned firms become able to substitute some trade credit with long-term bank loans. The findings suggest that less opaque firms and non-state-owned firms benefit more from foreign bank entry and that collateral may only play a limited role in mitigating the problem of information asymmetry when creditors’ rights are not well protected in a host country.     

Market and Model Credit Default Swap Spreads: Mind the Gap!

Structural models of default establish a relation across the fair values of various asset classes (equity, bonds, credit derivatives) referring to the same company. In most circumstances such relation is verified in practice, as different financial assets tend to move in the same direction at similar speed. However, occasional deviations from the theoretical fair values occur, especially in times of financial turmoil. Understanding how the dynamics of the theoretical fair values of various assets compares to that of their market values is crucial to a number of market participants. This paper investigates whether a popular structural model, the CreditGrades approach proposed by Finger (2002) , Stamicar and Finger (2005) , succeeds in explaining the dynamic relation between equity/option variables and Credit Default Swap (CDS) premia at individual company level. We find that CDS model spreads display a significant correlation with CDS market spreads. However, the gap between the two is time varying and widens substantially in times of financial turbulence. The analysis of the gap dynamics reveals that this is partly due to episodes of decoupling between equity and credit markets, and partly due to shortcomings of the model. Finally, we observe that model spreads tend to predict market spreads.     

Precautionary Demand and Liquidity in Payment Systems

In large‐value real‐time gross settlement payment systems, banks rely heavily on incoming funds to finance outgoing payments. Such reliance necessitates a high degree of coordination and synchronization. We construct a model of a payment system calibrated for the U.S. Fedwire system and examine the impact of realistic disruptions motivated by the recent financial crisis. In such settings, individually cautious behavior can have a significant and detrimental impact on the overall functioning of the payment system through a multiplier effect. Our results quantify the mutually reinforcing nature of greater caution, and allow comparative statics analysis of shifts in key parameters.